Imagine you are the famously-stubborn leader of the Conservative Party, heading into an election with a substantial lead in the polls. George Osborne’s Evening Standard, Tim Farron of the Lib Dems and Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn are all calling on you to drop the net migration target. What do you do? Why, you keep it of […]
Why did the British vote for Brexit? This question has attracted a lively debate over the past year. For some, the vote was driven by concerns over sovereignty, a desire to restore effective control over national laws and institutions. For others, the vote was driven far more by immigration, a desire to reduce it and […]
“I’m tired of fighting old battles,” said one of Britain’s leading Remainers as he swept past me in the corridors of County Hall. “It’s time to move on.” Since the Brexit referendum, British politics has been overwhelmingly interpreted through the prism of Remain vs Leave. The coming general election is seen in some quarters as effectively […]
For many Leave campaigners, part of the appeal of Brexit was that once the UK had left the EU, it would be able to determine its own international trade and commercial policy, set its own tariffs and negotiate its own bilateral free trade agreements. As well as being an opportunity, this is also a challenge. Leaving the EU […]
On the afternoon of 29 March, 2017, a group of jubilant Members of the European Parliament were cutting cake and drinking Spanish cava outside the Old Hack Pub in Brussels, directly across from the offices of the European Commission. This collection of British, German, French, Italian, Polish and Czech politicians were celebrating the activation by […]
The latest thing we have to abnegate ourselves over is this idea that asylum seekers are only being offered the cheap seats in British society. According to the usual sources this is a matter of shame. So I hope we all do feel suitably ill at ease with ourselves? The actual complaint is, according to an […]
Much of the debate about the kind of Brexit that the UK should be seeking in its negotiations with the EU has focused on one question: soft or hard? The former implies prioritising continued access to the Single Market. The latter is taken to mean focusing above all on immigration control. The reason this is […]
In recent years, Japan has become a world-leading innovator in some unusual fields. Care homes have partnered with chefs to explore puréed and soft foods for elderly people who can no longer swallow with ease. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has funnelled billions of yen into developing robots that could pick people up and carry them to […]
In 2015, Angela Merkel’s government accepted more than one million refugees into Germany. She consulted neither her European partners nor her own citizens. Her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party consequently suffered a string of humiliating losses in state elections in 2016, while the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) made strong gains. In September 2017, Germans go […]
How serious is Venezuela’s crisis? Bad enough that, in 2016, Venezuelans became the top US asylum-seekers, having surpassed Guatemalans, Salvadorans and Mexicans. Venezuelan asylum claims increased by 150 per cent from 2015 to 2016. Though Venezuela does not publicly circulate emigration information, estimates suggest that between 700,000 and two million Venezuelans have emigrated since 1999 In […]
Even in the gamesworld of fantasy conflicts, a Dutch-Turkish War would seem improbably over-the-top. The suddenness with which the war of words between Holland and Turkey broke out over the weekend was, however, not quite the freak event many took it for. It brought into the open the rumbling resentments between Turkey as the eternal […]
Another day, another penny drops about the effects of Brexit. It seems it could cause low-end wages in Britain to rise. And we can’t have that, can we? Today’s outbreak of indignation over this comes courtesy of Pret A Manger. Their HR boss, Andrea Wareham, told the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee than hardly […]
Beneath the cartoonish histrionics, Donald Trump’s presidency already matters. Indeed, it is the mirror image of his predecessor’s, the second part of a drama entitled “What does being American mean?” Barack Obama offered one, impeccably liberal, answer to that question; Donald Trump offers another. One that is visceral, not intellectual; nativist, not universal. This is […]
Walls have a strong political connotation in post-war Europe. The most tragically famous was the Berlin wall built in 1961 to prevent citizens of the DDR (otherwise known as East Germany) from seeking refuge in the West. The fall of that wall in 1989 signalled the reunification not only of Germany but of the entire […]
America’s immigration policy has got the country to where it is today, for better or worse. It created a diverse and innovative nation that has pushed human civilisation forward. It also brought us President Trump, and with him, a more heated debate about immigration. But rather than continuing to shout over one another and refusing […]
My friend Inda Dae, a Somali refugee, has been waiting for 10 years to be reunited with his family in Ohio. They left from the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya when he was 16 years old. Now he is a man of 26. After five years of vetting by eight federal agencies, six different security […]
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